The man who knows where the 50% is
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John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.
If he had called David Ernst, he’d know. David has created some of the most powerful research tools in the industry. Beginning with Constellations –a project he inherited when he joined FCB—which merged two completely different database to provide mathematically defined customer insights, to developing performance models for Discovery and A&E which can even measure the foot traffic in stores that the channels originated.
A Decisive Moment – “One moment in particular was when I was going to college, I was interning at a local ABC affiliate, WIXT in Syracuse and wanted to get into production. There was the general sales manager of the station who kind of took me under his wing, and said, you really should consider the business side, the advertising side. Ultimately, I went to Young and Rubicam. And I would say that shaped me too, because that was the biggest agency at the time and the most sophisticated.
A change he would have never imagined – Media agencies being spun off from the creative agencies.
How did he cope – David created incredible models that mixed media habits with attitudes, behavior and demographics in order to give media agencies sharper customer insights than creative agencies. Over the years, Dave created even more sophisticated models for Discover (Discovery Engage) and A&E (Precision) which can even track customer behavior such as foot traffic into a store.
What would he say to a CEO or CMO interviewing older candidates – First: don't stereotype people. You know, there's misperceptions about baby boomers. One misperception is they're not tech forward. I would say I'm very tech forward. I was there when the internet first came out and I've never stopped being, you know, I've had computers my whole life.
I would also say experience can be a really important thing. They say “history doesn't really repeat. It rhymes.”
On second thoughts, Wanamaker would be wrong if he had had David Ernst on his side: none of his advertising budget would have been wasted.
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